Through installations, photographs, videos, paintings, collages, and drawings that use everyday elements, Cinthia Marcelle (1974 – Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state) explores the way objects, ideas, and concepts are arranged in the world, as well as the power structures and hierarchies that support these systems of organization—be they political, social, or cultural. Whether through large-scale installations or concerted actions involving several collaborators (such as roofers, performers, cleaning workers, or jugglers), Marcelle creates situations and interventions that question the status quo and invite us to envision other forms of collective organization.

The exhibition Cinthia Marcelle: por via das dúvidas gathers 49 works from different points in the artists career, from 1998 to the present day, 10 of which were designed especially for the show and in tandem with the context in which they are placed, be it the annual thematic axis or the very museums architecture. “The artist’s works function relationally with each other and with the space in which they are placed—as in a constellation in which meaning is created, changed, and rubbed by the combination of these factors. Thus, the exhibition does not aim to fit or categorize Marcelles' production within a logic that is unknown to her, but to follow the artist's reasoning,” says the curator Isabella Rjeille.

The title of the exhibition, Por via das dúvidas [By Means of Doubt] refers to a work by the artist that consists in drawing a brick wall with a roll of masking tape and a paper sheet. This work sets a relationship with another one, also shown in the exhibition, entitled Explicação [Explanation] (2014). In both, one can see the artist's simple gesture of interrupting the tapes length with a hand cut and carefully reassembling it in the shape of a wall on a paper sheet. What distinguishes them is the depiction of the wall: while Explicação shows an intact wall, Por via das dúvidas (2014) depicts it in ruins.

The two works comprise a microcosm of Marcelles production by bringing together three of its recurring aspects (materials, time, and color) around two main subjects: education and work. The figures of students and workers are frequent in her works, as protagonists of actions and performances that begin from their own tasks. Events such as clashes, riots, and uprisings appear in the artist’s work due to their ability to destabilize and rearrange the structures in which they are placed. Her work also shows materials from school or construction settings, as a means of evoking the power of social change that exists in these contexts.

In R = 0 (Homenagem aos secundaristas) [R = 0 (Tribute to the Second Grade Students)] (2022), a development of the work R = 0 (Homenagem a M.A.) [R = 0 (Tribute to M.A.)] (2009), produced especially for this exhibition, the first aspect is clear: the significance of materials. In it, the artist incorporated a school chair used by second-grade students during the 2016 occupations of public schools against government measures that would have a detrimental effect on Brazilian public education. The work consists of balancing this kind of furniture on a handful of blackboard chalk—a technique taught by teacher Michael Asbury, who, when he was a student, did the same in the classroom in the absence of the teacher. The result is an installation that challenges the order of things to remain standing.

Another example of that is the new work reconfigured for MASP based on Educação pela pedra [Education by Stone] (2016), at first shown in Projects 105: Cinthia Marcelle (2016–17), at MoMA PS1s Duplex Gallery in New York. At MASP, carefully positioned stacked concrete blocks, forming a structure resembling a wall, have their gaps filled with blackboard chalk. Instead of the apparent grout, which leaks through the gaps—an usual aspect in the buildings of Lina Bo Bardi, the architect who designed MASP—, the blackboard chalk is the material that leaks between these spaces.

“I believe that some of my working procedures are akin to Lina Bo Bardi’s working practices, especially regarding the opening of the creation/execution processes to the workers team to take part in. Experts are essential for the development of a society-led project, and the participation of these people is key when one intends to attain a diverse and plural proposal,” Cinthia Marcelle points out.

The second aspect, time—one of the elements that organize our lives, whether counted in calendars, clocks, and agendas—, takes shape in the series Calendário [Calendar] (2018–20). In it, time is counted based on the handiwork of the artist and her collaborators with the materials used in the work: fabric, paint, slat, and shoelace. “Calendário is a series of paintings that makes visible in its final product the relationship between time and work applied in the undertaking of each piece,” explains Isabella Rjeille.

On the other hand, color—an element capable of inscribing and erasing, making visible or invisible certain aspects of reality, and with plenty of historical and social meanings—is, in Marcelles oeuvre, an aesthetic, ethical, and political choice. Such complexity is prominent in the series of photographs Capa morada [Stay (Cape Town)] (2003), carried out in partnership with the South African artist Jean Meeran during an art residency in Cape Town, South Africa. Divided into four parts (tecidos [fabrics], roupas [clothes], coisas [things], and pessoas [people]), this series records the artist in the process of locating herself in a context unfamiliar to her own. In the set of photographs, Marcelle has her body totally covered by fabrics, blending into the landscape or getting lost amidst the accumulation of objects in a street market.

“Living for a while in South Africa ended up being, within my sense of locality, as a non-white person, a natural movement in my artistic path. There, in a process of displacement and recognition, I developed with Jean Meeran the series Capa morada, in which I blended into the city, lost myself, and then found myself in the South African world, at the same time close to and far from my own,” reflects Marcelle. “So, this progressive process of my unveiling and familiarization with the mixed-race part of Cape Town somehow had something of a naturally political action for the time—even because this same segregation was happening and still happens, in a more covert way, in my own country,” she concludes.

Cinthia Marcelle: por via das dúvidas is part of the MASPs biennial programming devoted to Histórias brasileiras [Brazilian Histories] (2021–22), on the occasion of the bicentennial of the Independence of Brazil in 2022. This year, the program also includes shows by Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), Abdias Nascimento (1914–2011), Luiz Zerbini, Joseca Yanomami, Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt (1919–1977), and Judith Lauand, in addition to the group exhibition Brazilian Histories.